OpenText (news, site) and Microsoft, who have been working together on GRC for quite some time, have had their combined records management ability endorsed this week with the award of DoD 5015.02-STD certification.

OpenText says that its ECM Suite 2010 is the first major enterprise content management system to be given the certification, considerably extending the reach and use of both software products.

OpenText and DoD 5015.02-STD

DoD 5015.02-STD is managed by the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC), and involves a rigorous testing process. The successful outcome of which means the combined systems provides an acceptable records management solution for the US Department of Defense.

This, of course, means that the combined solution will also be acceptable to any federal agency looking for a records management system, as well as any other company in the private sector which, for whatever reason, needs some heavyweight and compliant records management software.

The testing process, in this case, involved OpenText Records Management and its Application Governance and Archiving for SharePoint offerings being tested in an environment that included SharePoint 2010 and a full set of Microsoft operating systems, office applications and database servers.

Through the test, OpenText met requirements for applying records management policies and securely managing the entire lifecycle of the information.

SharePoint 2010 and Records Management

While this is clearly good for OpenText, it is also pretty good for SharePoint 2010. Since the SharePoint 2010 release in May of last year, there have been a considerable number of arguments surrounding the merits of records management in SharePoint.

While the records management functionality, as we saw before Christmas, is considerably better than it was in SharePoint 2007, in the compliance-obsessed world we live in, it is still not clear whether it goes far enough for many companies, who as a result have by-passed it in favour of third-party vendors.

Research carried out by AIIM last summer confirmed that few enterprises are really looking at the records management element of SharePoint at all, but also showed that there would be a considerable increase in the use of that element of SharePoint over the coming 12 to 18 months. It showed that:

35% are not using SharePoint records management functionality

25% plan to use records management in SP2010

33% prefer to use a third party system,

42% of SharePoint users are not at a records management stage yet

For users, the experience has not been great -- with over 40% saying that the records management element of SharePoint has major shortcomings.

However, with OpenText, SharePoint not only gets a records management system, but also one that has just been given the best certification it could possibly get in the US.

While it makes OpenText a strong choice for companies that are being forced to look at records management in SharePoint 2010, it also makes SharePoint 2010 far more attractive to companies that are considering a SharePoint deployment but are unsure because of concerns surrounding records management. For both then, the certification really is a win-win situation.

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